After three relentlessly dark films about ‘nothingness’, Sam Mendes’s new work is an airy comedy with a sense of optimism more akin to his own life
SAM MENDES, a tad greyer and a touch more portly than he once was, hurries into the room and, to my surprise, doesn't ask what it is we're here to talk about. We are in the deliciously old-fashioned Caledonian Hotel on Edinburgh's Princes Street. True, Mendes's latest film, an utterly charming comedy, Away We Go, has just opened the Edinburgh Film Festival, but he has had so much else on the go he could be forgiven for launching into a description of the wrong project.
For much of last winter, Sam stood on red carpets and tried to persuade the movie establishment to grant his previous film, the draining Revolutionary Road, as many awards as they felt able. Just a few days before we met, his productions of Chekov's The Cherry Orchardand Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, featuring a mix of American and British actors, opened at The Old Vic in London. His production company also recently staged a musical version of Shrekon Broadway.
If this is Wednesday, it must be Away We Go. "Yes. I think that's right," he says with a smile. "It has been an insane time and not entirely well planned by me. Mind you, we made Revolutionary Roadtwo years ago and it took all that time to come out. I have loved each job individually, but it can be difficult switching from one to the other."
SO, HOW DOES he manage to shift gear? One minute he's being interviewed about Revolutionary Road, the next he's discussing artwork for the poster of Away We Go.
“The weird thing is that I used to find it much easier. When I ran the Donmar theatre in London, I found those shifts no problem. Now I do get a bit more grouchy and bad-tempered when I am dragged away from something.”
Well, today he’s doing a good job of suppressing any inclinations towards grouchiness. Now 44, Mendes manages to combine a restless intelligence with a bracing lack of pretension. Such an attitude must have helped him deal with the extra level of celebrity that he reluctantly attained after marrying one Kate Winslet six years ago.
To that point, Sam – son of a Trinidadian lecturer of Portuguese descent, and with a Jewish mother who writes children's books – had been no more famous than most Oscar-winning directors. (That is to say, he was rarely bothered when buying yoghurt in the local Spar.) Formerly a successful artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse theatre in Covent Garden, Mendes secured that Academy Award for American Beauty, his first film.
Yet when he turned up beside Winslet, star of Revolutionary Road, during awards season – she eventually won the Oscar for her role in his pal Stephen Daldry's The Reader– he must have felt ever so slightly in the shade.
“My wife won an Academy Award on top of all that other business,” he says. “And of course that’s not just about the Academy Awards. It’s about four months of run-up to the Academy Awards and the other shows.
“You have all that media scrutiny that goes with it. I wanted to be supportive and so I was. But sometimes I got to talk to her for just two minutes in the day. She’d say: ‘Oh, I got the SAG award.’ And then we’d go to sleep. There wasn’t time to discuss what it was like. But I was happy that it amounted to something in the end.” Is hawking your product on red carpets part of the downside of the business? “Is it always a pleasant experience? Not really. Is it necessary? I’m afraid it is. It does make a difference.”
For some years now, Mendes and Winslet have lived in downtown New York with their two children and Winslet’s daughter from a previous marriage. Yet they could not seem more English. Raised in Reading, educated at Oxford and Cambridge, Mendes still talks as if he’s just sauntered off a cricket green. I wonder if they worry that their children might grow up American. Then again, maybe “worry” is the wrong word.
“No. That’s probably the right word,” he laughs. “We’ve been there a long time. It’s not something we planned. I certainly don’t feel American. We are very clearly British and the children still seem fairly English. Maybe if one of us was American we might have that problem. But I reckon we’re okay.”
If you stared a little too closely at Revolutionary Road, you might have felt yourself fearing for Mendes's and Winslet's relationship. A relentlessly bleak adaption of Richard Yates's great novel about marital discord in the US in the mid-1950s, the film saw Winslet and DiCaprio bellow furiously from opening credits to final fade-out.
FEAR NOT. Away We Gooffers an altogether more optimistic take on married life. Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, currently the hippest husband-and-wife team in American letters, the picture finds John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph playing a largely contended couple touring America as they contemplate the impending birth of their first child. Indeed, the airy Away We Go might be viewed as a perfect complement to the deliberately stifling Revolutionary Road.
“Yes, absolutely. I am going to borrow that description,” he says.
"There is communication in one and not in the other. We were living under that black cloud of Revolutionary Roadfor a year and that gets into your system. But actually I am not with Yates on this. I am not a Yatesian. I don't believe that men and women are necessarily destined to fall out." Yet his films have, to date, been pretty darn bleak. American Beautystarred Kevin Spacey as a suburban everyman giving in to mid-life meltdown. Road to Perditionwas as miserable as gangster films get. Jarheaddepicted the first Gulf War as an exercise in regimented boredom.
Come to think of it, his stage hits haven't been exactly jolly either. He has directed all but one of Chekov's plays – he will complete the set with Three Sisterslater this year – and his musical productions take in the Nazi-heavy Cabaret and the orphan-rich Oliver!.
"Honestly, I am actually quite a positive person," he says. "It's true I have made four films and they are all dark. In fact, there is a core of nothingness within all of them. Jarhead, for example, is about the nothingness of war. Then I read Away We Goand I thought: yes, the kernel here is optimistic. I have my counterpoint to Revolutionary Road."
Mendes has, it seems, had a pretty jolly life. So I suppose we shouldn't be all that surprised that he remains optimistic. Never particularly interested in films or plays as a child, he drifted into theatre at university and, by the time he was 25, he was directing Judi Dench in a West End production of (him again) Chekov's The Cherry Orchard. In 1992 he was appointed director of the tiny Donmar and set about turning it into a theatrical dynamo. Nicole Kidman went there to play in his production of David Hare's The Blue Room. Revivals of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerieand Stephen Sondheim's Companywere raved about. Yet he eventually found that his own growing fame (still just a director's fame, mind) became something of an encumbrance.
"The more well-known you get, the busier you become in that job," he says. "When investors actually know who you are, they want to hear from you and just you. Of course, when you're spending someone else's money you have to be responsible in that way. That's fair enough." I can't imagine dealing with Hollywood producers is any less stressful than dealing with theatrical angels. Every successful director has a horror story about wrestling with some philistine who has eyes only for the bottom line. It is said that Martin Scorsese had to be restrained when an executive threatened to cut Taxi Driverin order to secure a more lenient certificate.
THEN AGAIN, when you win a best director’s Oscar for your first film, I guess you do secure a degree of artistic freedom.
“Artistic freedom, yes,” he says cautiously. “Of course, you don’t have the freedom to dictate. Somebody else has to like the work. I have final cut, so nobody else can touch the film after I’ve made it.
“Mind you, if they don’t like it they’re not going to market it. So there wouldn’t be any point making it.” He pauses to wind up for an aphorism concerning the deviousness of the Hollywood enforcers.
“In the words of Mike Nichols, you may have final cut, but that won’t stop them phoning your mom.”
Away We Gois on limited release from Friday.